The Bigger Picture

Alon Zakaim Fine Art is proud to present The Bigger Picture, an exhibition of large-scale oils by celebrated Modern and Contemporary artists. The show will include monumental paintings by household names such as Alan Davie, Eileen Agar, Terry Frost and Jim Dine.

Alan Davie's tremendous triptych Queen Emma, 1968, the largest painting in the exhibition, is a complex celebration of the artist's freedom of abstraction and the primitive, enigmatic symbols found repeatedly in his oeuvre. In his attempts to bring forth elements of the unconscious and to paint as automatically as possible, Davie shared an affinity with the Surrealists.

Eileen Agar was the only British woman asked to exhibit at the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 and Seated Sphinx, 1956, painted twenty years later, is the largest work by Agar to ever appear on the secondary market. Against the Mediterranean blue sky, a vocabulary of man-made and natural forms fluidly evolves from one shape to another. The mythical sphinx rises up composed of colourful shapes, snakes, moons and leaves, motifs frequently repeated by the artist. These shapes become visual metaphors imbued with the imaginative playfulness consistently present in Agar's art.

Much like Agar and Davie, Terry Frost developed a series of recurrent motifs, which ranged from arrowheads, diamonds and triangles to circles, discs, half discs and quarter discs. His vast painting Rhythms, 1965-66 is a sequence of suspended forms displaying the love of vibrant colour inherent in Frost's painting. The paint is saturated to allow for the fluid and sensuous application that is characteristic of his abstract works from the 1950s and 1960s, while the painting itself explores the notions of balance, rhythm, shape, colour, space and depth that is typical of Frost's later and more reductive work.

Complimenting the dynamic post war paintings is Jim Dine's colossal Dogwood Spring, 2008. Hanging two by three meters, Dine's beloved heart motif is repeated and laid over a cluster of brightly coloured marks, transforming the simple forms into a complex structure. Describing the heart as a template for his emotions, Dine employs the motif to express his feelings and to experiment with colour, form and texture.

The Bigger Picture is a selling exhibition and is on display at Alon Zakaim Fine Art, 5-7 Dover St. London W1S 4LD from 13 November - 12 January 2018 *extended until 9 Feb 2018. Gallery opening hours are 9am-6pm, Monday-Friday. Weekends by appointment only.